Dorri Halbertal, Ph.D.

Dorri Halbertal will work as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Dmitri Basov at Columbia University, where he will employ optical methods to investigate new physics of quantum materials. Halbertal started as a theoretical astrophysicist and developed advanced numerical models to study supernovae and then changed fields, receiving his Ph.D. in 2017 in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Professor Eli Zeldov. Halbertal developed a novel and unprecedentedly sensitive superconducting-device-based technique for thermal imaging at the nanoscale (Nature 539, 2016). Halbertal’s work has helped create a new field of heat-dissipation imaging of quantum systems and led to the identification of a previously unknown heat-dissipation mechanism involving localized states at the atomic scale that dominates the heat loss in state-of-the-art graphene (atomic monolayer of carbon) devices (Science 358, 2017). Halbertal received the European Microscopy Society Outstanding Award for 2016 and the Israel Dostrovsky Prize of Excellence for his work and was also awarded the Rothschild Fellowship for years 2018/2019.